


By Night

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Sunless Skies
Genre: Caretaking, Does this count as cannibalism? I think it probably does., F/M, Nightmare-inspired, Slightly Sinister Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 21:52:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18979057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: The Repentant Devil takes his duties seriously.





	By Night

**Author's Note:**

> Context for this: 
> 
> https://sunlessskies.gamepedia.com/A_Nightmare:_Hunger_by_Night

It’s well past what would be midnight in London when the Captain finds herself awake, halfway between her cabin and a destination no longer clear in her mind. It’s the Repentant Devil’s hand on her arm that pulls her back to herself, and his voice, low in her ear, as he says, “You’ve been wandering.”

She shakes her head, trying to remember what she’s doing here at this hour of night. She’s lost, she says. No, hungry. No, she’s –

“Cold,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep. I shouldn’t be this cold.” The words sound curiously flat and distant, as if she’s not the one saying them. Maybe she isn’t. It’s hard, right now, to think, or to put one word after another. They’re not the right words – too imprecise, with too much room for meaning to get lost in the space between them. That’s dangerous. This language is nothing more than vibration in air, but even these words might unmake a world, if spoken carelessly. Still, these things are true: she’s cold. She cannot sleep. She’s lost. The Repentant Devil ushers her into his cabin with his hand on her back, and steers her to a chair. She allows it.

“Sit,” he says. His voice is soft, but it carries the resonance of a command, and she isn’t sure if it’s weariness or acquiescence that causes her to collapse. There’s a spark of anger at that – rapid as a rookery fire, frightening in its alien intensity – but it burns itself out quickly. _He has no right,_ something within her insists, _he oversteps his place,_ but that isn’t right. She doesn’t think things like that. She doesn’t want to be the kind of person who believes that anyone has a _place._ Even so, she finds herself speaking, before she can bite back the words that are and are not hers: “What makes you presume – ”

“One of my duties,” he says, “is to concern myself with the safety and wellbeing of the crew. It was included, if you recall, as a sub-clause in my contract. We take those seriously, where I come from.”

“I’m captain,” she says. “Not crew. My wellbeing is my own concern.”

“I’m aware of that,” he says, watching her with a curious tilt to his head that leaves her feeling like an organism under the microscope. “Nevertheless. I think it best if none of the others see you until you can put yourself back together.”

He’s calm in a way that speaks not of relaxation but control; she’d once seen an engineer handle a crate of munitions with that same combination of professional interest and certainty that, if jostled carelessly, it might explode. He is, she thinks for one unbalanced moment, _afraid_ – and then it’s gone, whatever she’d seen or imagined. He turns to the chemist’s workstation that he’s made of his desk and busies himself with bottles, giving no impression of attention paid to anything beyond the sphere of his work. All the same, she’s suddenly certain that if she stood to leave, he would put himself between her and the door. If he did that, she would be obliged to react, and things would take a turn for the bad. She needs to avoid that. The troubling thing is that when she asks herself why, what comes to mind is not that she doesn’t want to be murdered on board her own locomotive, but that she doesn’t want to hurt him.

 _Grandiosity,_ she thinks. First sign of star-madness. Perhaps he’s right that she shouldn’t be around the crew in this state.

She falls back heavily in her chair and closes her eyes, caught between sleep and the jagged edge of wakefulness. The Repentant Devil keeps his cabin warmer than anyone ought to, and still she finds herself shivering. There’s the clink of glass, and the sound of footsteps approaching, almost too quiet to be heard.

“Captain,” the Devil says, and she looks up to see him standing in front of her, a wineglass in his outstretched hand.

“Drink,” he says. “Believe it or not, it will do you good.”

“Should I ask what you’ve put in there?”

“Wine from Pan,” he says. “Distilled spirits from Avon. More honey than you strictly require. Something medicinal I picked up in Port Prosper.”

Laudanum, perhaps. Something else to dose her into a welcome sleep. _Kill or cure_ , she supposes, and despite it all, she does trust him not to kill her. Not even to try.

The wine is cool when she takes it, an ink-dark vintage, and she is, suddenly, very thirsty. She remembers – she isn’t sure the memory is hers – that Eleutherian grapes are sweet, with an aftertaste like midnight. Something shimmers within, bright as starshine, and she has the fleeting thought that there are reasons other than fear of poison not to drink what he’s given her. But time slips sideways, out of her grip, and when clarity returns she finds that she’s drained the glass without realizing it.

That should worry her. It _does_ worry her. But there had been something missing, and now there’s not, and she feels a little more like herself – not cold, not drugged, not half so hungry as she was. Just tired. If she could, she’d curl up and sleep for a thousand years. Even a night would do, but it’s clear that the Repentant Devil doesn’t mean to let her rest. He crouches in front of her, looking up instead of down, and lays a hand on her knee. Still calm, still curious.

“Tell me,” he says, “about London. The river, the rooftops. The people who lived there.”

“Why do you care about those things?” she asks hazily.

“I don’t,” he says. “But you need to remember how to.”

She blinks at him and licks her dry lips, tasting wine and remembered light, and tries to put words to what she knows of her city and herself. It’s difficult at first. The thread of story is tangled, and none of it seems quite real, or quite important. But as she speaks, that changes; the London in her mind takes on weight and definition, and soon enough she’s laughing about a youth spent dredging crates of Greyfields from the river – _A wonder that stuff didn’t kill us_ – and picking the pockets of passersby. Yes, she thinks, that was her. Still is. The people she knew then are worth remembering, as more than – no. She shies away from that thought. All she knows is that she can’t let herself forget them.

She misses those days, she says, and he nods in something like understanding – _We all have days that we miss._

“Sleep, now,” he says. “And you find yourself lost again, come to me first.” 

And as she sinks back in the chair, halfway to dreaming, he rises to brush the hair back from her face and run a thumb across her cheek. His kind have made a language out of gesture and motion, and there’s a story untold in that touch, almost proprietary, unmistakably tender.

“You are my captain, after all,” he says softly. “I mean to see that you’re taken care of.”


End file.
